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07041776
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Why split VM's into 2GB files? Performance?

Hey all,

When installing a new virtual machine recently, I was looking at the settings and finally decided to ask: are there any performance reasons to split a virtual machine's virtual disk across several 2-gig files?  Personally I'd prefer to keep it all in one file, but I recognize that Fusion makes this the default, so I'm curious: if I make it all in one file, instead of several 2GB split files, will I be causing some performance issues or taking a performance hit?

Thanks!

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FranckRookie
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Hi,

Welcome to the forums.

Choosing to split VMDK into 2GB files has quite no impact on performance. It is usually done because 2GB files are easier to handle if you want to shrink, defragment or copy them.

Regards

Franck

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FranckRookie
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Hi,

Welcome to the forums.

Choosing to split VMDK into 2GB files has quite no impact on performance. It is usually done because 2GB files are easier to handle if you want to shrink, defragment or copy them.

Regards

Franck

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07041776
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Hey Franck,

Thanks a lot for your reply!  I knew that about network transfer/compression/defragmentation etc., but I wasn't sure if choosing to have it all in one single file would cause a performance hit.  I appreciate your input - thank you!

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Also, some older filesystems will not support really large files; for example, FAT32, which was standard on older versions of Windows, could not handle files 4GB or larger. Some older archiving and file compression applications have similar limitations.

So, splitting the disk files makes the virtual machine more portable.

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KrishReddy
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I've not tried this, but, I was thinking, will it help reducing the size of the timemachine backups? I've configured my windows disk size as 150GB in Fusion and everytime I take a TimeMachine backup the entire 150GB file gets copied. I'd like TimeMachine be able to take more granular backups and was wondering if having Vmware fusion split the disk image into 2GB files will help.

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